#Twitterfad? Depends on your POV.

A recent post on Business Week's Innovation/Brand Blog claims "Twitter is a Fad (duh)." It refers to a Nielsen study just released that points to the lack of Twitter stickiness as being a potential roadblock to long-term growth. While the point the study makes is a valid one, making the leap to dismiss Twitter as a fad whose "popularity may soon fade" is a shortcut at best and bandwagoneering at worst.

There is a point of view implicit in the "Twitter is a fad" argument that I'd like to deconstruct for a moment. I believe it is a shout-out to those who are looking for ways to reach out to potential customers and expand their company's brand; or said differently, to monetize on Twitter's coattails. And because of that bottom-line point of view, claiming that Twitter is a passing fad is cynical shorthand for "this trendy thing is done for, don't bother here, no money to be made. Move along." Exploring new business models and ways to reach your customers, whether through social networks or other means, is necessary and appropriate; it's the trendsters debunking the trends because of their trendiness that I find, well, rather self-fulfilling and circular.

More importantly, I think the debunking misses the point and discounts a different and equally valid point of view: not "what can Twitter do for your company/your bottom line," but rather, "what does Twitter do for people?" And if you dismiss Twitter too quickly as a fad, you miss out on the longer term opportunities. To Howard Rheingold's point,

RT @hrheingold IMO, ppl quit Twitter and perceive it as a fad because they don't make the effort to learn how to use it productively http://bit.ly/TMD2F.

For those of you not familiar with Twitter, I just "retweeted" a post by Howard Rheingold. He was commenting on the "Twitter is a Fad" Business Week blog post, bringing up a fantastic and yet poignantly obvious point: Twitter is what you make of it. If you only skim the surface, if you rely on others for the meaning of the thing, you miss out. You see, it turns out, I only found the Business Week "Twitter is a Fad" blog post because I follow someone interesting on Twitter. That's the beauty of Twitter. Two months ago, even as a creative director in a global innovation firm, well versed in social media, I couldn't understand Twitter's value proposition. It didn't have meaning for me as a person in a networked world. So I decided to get on, experiment, see what mental model I could extract from this controversial service. I started by following people in my network of friends and colleagues that are "interesting" to me: they do or say things that are relevant to me as a designer, thinker, mother, friend, human. But more than that, I was able to look inside each of their networks, and see not only who they thought was interesting, but see what those other interesting people had to say and whether that was of interest to me. So with a very few clicks, I exponentially increased my "interestingness network." I get a steady stream of Twitter updates that are uniquely appropriate for me; this is a tailored, immediate, intimate stream of knowledge that I never could have created through the best RSS aggregator or received via the most clever online curator.

What is timeless and important about Twitter are its implications for humans: how we can reach out, uncover, discover, connect and make sense of our world in a way that is highly personal and meaningful. No matter the technology or the time period, humans will always have the drive to extend their reach, to evolve, or simply to know themselves in a new way. What you make of that, how your business innovates on that or not, is up to you. And that's no fad.